Intuitive Painting, just about done...

Since this is the first time I have done one of these style of paintings I am not actually sure when I will know it is done. That said, it feels like it is just about there. I do a little on it now and then and after a doodling session yesterday I think I might be just about finished. I will just prop it up and look at it a while more until it tells me it is done for sure. HERE is the post for when I started it and here it is now:

I think I am getting tired of working on this one too and want to move on to more. That might be the deciding factor to deciding if it done or not!

So since I started I have found a few other people who do this style of painting too and have been devouring their blogs, You Tube videos and Flickr pages for ideas and techniques. The people I have found so far are Flora Bowley, Tracy Verdugo, Connie Hozvicka, Michelle Fauss, and Justine Aldersey-Williams. I would love to know of more, so if you know of anyone else doing this kind of "intuitive" or "fearless" painting, please let me know in the comments! Thanks!

Dare...

I woke up this morning really wanting to use bright colors. And wanting to get back to my art journal, which had sort of fallen by the wayside while I painted and did other things.

So after I did some art room cleanup (still more to do but it was a start) I got out my neglected journal. I had a few pages with backgrounds already done so I just did this page on one of those. It started out very muted shades of gelli printed greens with some stencils. I need to use up my duller muted pages now and go for the bold colors for a while!

This page: gelli printed, stencils, collaged bits, paint pens, stamps. With the statement I need to follow: DARE TO BE BOLD!

Might be time to start reading my Kindle copy of Daring Greatly!

Linked to: Art Journal Every Day

Fun art day and cleaning my art area (again)...

Yes I know, I am always having to clean up my little space but yesterday when I was at Leslie's for our fun art play day I saw how she had rearranged her space and it made me want to do some more rearranging on mine!

So we made some more Roben-Marie style pages! It always amazed me that even though I do the same basic thing to follow her page style, they can come out so varied. This was last time. This time I tried some different color combinations. Which do you like better?

It is a many many layered thing. Starts out with some stencils, then gelli plate colors, then collage, doodling, more color, more doodling, more collage, you get the idea!

So today I came across a couple more of my newsprint pad pages that I put my work on so I thought I would share them here. Remnants of gelli print brayer clean off, spray inks, general left over colors, etc. Feel free to download either of the following and use as you would like in your art work. As usual I would love credit back to me and it would be great if you linked to what you made with these freebies!

Linked to:
Mandarin Orange Monday
Colorful Gelli Party
Create Every Day
Blue Monday

WOYWW #207

Well I totally flaked out about it last week and didn't take any pix of my workdesk for the WOYWW linky party! That is what the end of school days does to me! 2 more weeks and then 10 weeks of vacation! Then next year is my last year at work! Not that I don't love what I do but it is TIME to retire!

So last night I was looking at all the stuff from that watercolor class last weekend and decided to take a photo of one of the techniques I hadn't shown already. And before I go on I want to say: I HATE THE NEW FLICKR INTERFACE!! Takes a LOT longer to get my photos to blog!

This is what we did: made an abstract watercolor and let it dry. Then we took a small frame (a card with a hole cut in the middle). We cut out three areas that we liked in the abstract.

And then he gave us blank cards (from Kelly Paper) and we glued the swatch on and voila! A mini-painting!

These are the only 2 brushes we used in the class! I love how the calligraphy brush held the paint -- might look into getting other sizes of it.

Linked to:
WOYWW
Paint Party Friday
Show and Tell Saturday

Watercolor class...

Yesterday I took a 7 hour watercolor class @ the Learning Exchange in Sacramento. It was taught by local artist Robert Dvorak. All in all it was a great class but I did discover something about myself: 7 hours is way too long for me to be in any sort of class, fun or not! I was exhausted when I got home! I was reminded of that old Far Side cartoon about being excused from class because my brain was full! I think my learning curve started petering out around 3 pm...

But none the less, I learned a ton of techniques and came away with a much great appreciation of watercolor as a medium.

And... came away with the total appreciation for needed a LOT of practice to get good at it. It was quite the challenge!

We used a 7"x10" watercolor block and did a lot of exercises and techniques. Here are a few of my meager attempts...

Mountain with waterfall:

People:

Trees:

Banana:

It was a fast-paced with lots of laughter and fun! A couple of other things I learned about myself: I need to wash my hands more as evidenced by the dirty smudges on my examples, which I did not edit out due to sheer laziness on my part this morning! I also need to move my shoulders and neck around more -- I was very sore when I got home. Even though we had a lot of breaks and up and down times moving out paintings out to dry, I think when I paint I tense up too much and was definitely feeling it when I got home. Relax Rhonda!

Linking to:

Mandarin Orange Monday
Blue Monday
Monday Mellow Yellow
Creative Every Day

Free journal backgrounds...

I am trying something new. I would like to start a semi-regular posting of free backgrounds, gelli prints, and other things you may use in your artwork. I am scanning them @ 300 dpi so you can resize them to your needs. I hope this will work so I would like to ask you to try them out. I can scan them at higher dpi (600) but they take some much more computer space so I am hoping this is a good compromise. I would LOVE to see how you use them so please feel free to post your link to anything you make with them in the comments. Credit back to where you got them is also much appreciated. Thanks

Let's try this!

WIP... Intuitive Painting

Recently I discovered the idea of Intuitive Painting (a la Flora Bowley) and decided to try my hand at it. I got Flora's book and read through it and when I got to the end realized I still had no idea how to start, so I scoured the Internet, devoured You Tube videos and sort of figured out the following: put paint on your canvas (or paper), put more paint on, add more paint over and around the other paint, keep going until some shapes emerge that speak to you, highlight the shapes, fill in, paint more and eventually it is done. (ok maybe I oversimplify). Oh yes, and add music and move around to get all those life forces (or whatever they are, maybe just my bowels) moving while and between paintings.

So here is a small progression of what I have done up til now. I am still working on it and will do so probably a good while bit this is the last few days work. Maybe when I am done I will make a short Animoto video to run through the process. I am taking photos now and then when I remember to document the changes.

Working with acrylics, paint pens, and inks on an 11" x 14" canvas board.

Linked to:
Paint Party Friday
Show and Tell Saturday
Mandarin Orange Monday
Inspire Me Monday
Creative Every Day
Blue Monday

WOYWW #205

I have been working on some painting and art journaling the last few days so my work table is scattered with those things. Well, it is rather neat now because I put a ton of stuff away this last weekend so I could actually GET to the table!

And of course my favorite part of the newsprint pad is the random color that is left behind...

I have been into circles again lately... (various WIP)

The art journal pages were both basically the same at first then I changed the left one to see what would come through when I painted over all the doodling and stuff underneath... I like where it is taking me.

Linked to WOYWW.

Working on the 21 Secrets class today...

I decided to pick another of the 21 Secrets workshops that had doodling and working a bit outside my normal zone so I picked Roben-Marie Smith's Baby Got Back-to-Back class to do next. I have enjoyed Roben-Marie's work for many years and have taken a class or two from her here and there but have never attempted to do a journal page in her style, which is how this workshop starts out. HERE is a link to her wonderful journal page tutorials!

So the workshop starts out by making a journal page in her style, which actually took me 2 days. Once again I was working on pages I had taken out of the 9" x 12" Canson Montval Field All-Media Journal. I decided last night to start by making 2 pages so it took a little longer, and then part way through I wanted them to dry completely so I left them overnight. I made 2 pages because one of them has to get cut up for the book part of this workshop and then I would have an extra, although now I have to decide which one I want to keep and which to use for the Back-to-Back book part of the workshop!

It starts by adding color to your page (painting and gelli printing):

Then some collage and stamping:

Then lots more inking, painting, doodling...

And finally both finished pages.

What I enjoyed about this part of the workshop was using colors together that I normally do not use much of and making a page much busier than I normally do and having it look nice in the end. What I found difficult was having to constantly go back over things and doodle more or fix doodles that got covered or painted on that I wanted to show, and the general fussiness of working these pages. It sure looks easy when Roben-Marie does it but it takes a lot longer than I thought!

But I gotta admit, these are two of my favorite pages I have done lately! I think I will incorporate some of this working over and over in my art journal pages now and see where it takes me! Thanks for pushing my envelope Roben-Marie!

Playing with more gelli prints...

Started doing up a bunch of lighter colored gelli prints for additions to art journal pages and scanned one to test out how it scanned. I didn't like the plain scan all that much so I started playing with the colors in PaintShopPro (my cheapo version of Photoshop) and made a mosaic in BigLabs to see some of the various colors I adjusted it to. The darkest one I made a negative of the colors. I have not played around with PSP for a long time and I had forgotten a lot of the cool things it can do, so I think I will be playing with it a bit in the coming weeks.

This was the original scan:

Linked to:
Pink Saturday
Colorful Journey Gelli Party
Ruby Tuesday2
Mandarin Orange Monday
Mosaic Monday
Blue Monday

Another painting with those lines...

I had so much fun using that silicone pastry brush to make lines on the last painting that I did another one, similar but larger (9" x 12" on canvas board) and with more little lines!

I am realizing I have no idea how to NAME an abstract painting! So for now this one is Window Reflections. That might change quickly if someone gives me a better idea for what to call it! Feel free to leave suggestions!

Linked to:
Orange You Glad It's Friday -- Take a look HERE-- she featured one of my other paintings! Wow!
Creative Every Day
Paint Party Friday

WOYWW #204

The last couple of nights I have been reading a lot of art blogs (in a never-ending attempt to catch up!), watching videos from various online classes I am in, and pulling out the watercolors to try a couple of techniques and play a bit.

So this is what is on my desk today until I have more time to do more watercolors. This is from a VIDEO I saw from Whitney Ferre (one of the 21 Secrets teachers but this was a separate video on You Tube), where you just doodle or scribble with watercolors. It is so out of my box that I am trying it just to see if I can do it. My first instinct is to grab the markers and go that route, so these last couple of nights I have been playing with the flow of watercolor, looking for a more zen-like approach.

Anyway, my desk as I last saw it while I pondered my results...

Linked to: WOYWW